The Nominees

MaddAddam

Margaret Atwood

2015 Longlist

Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, which is being fortified against man and giant Pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasi-human species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. While their reluctant prophet, Jimmy – Crake’s one-time friend – recovers from a debilitating fever, it’s left to Toby to narrate the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb.

Meanwhile, Zeb searches for Adam One, founder of the God’s Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. Now, under threat of an imminent Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters.

At the centre, is the extraordinary story of Zeb’s past, which involves a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge.

Combining adventure, humour, romance, superb storytelling, and an imagination that is at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Margaret Atwood, and a moving and dramatic conclusion to her internationally celebrated dystopian trilogy.

(from publisher)

About the Author

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; and The Year of the Flood. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

Librarians’ Comments

Combining adventure, humour, romance, superb storytelling and an imagination that is at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Margaret Atwood. A moving an dramatic conclusion to her internationally celebrated dystopian trilogy beginning with Oryx and Crake.

Our reading committee liked Atwood’s third entry in her well known dystopian trilogy because her writing cannot be surpassed. The energy and cleverness of the prose and ideas, her searing intelligence and wit entertain, shock, galvanize and take one’s breath away when reading.

The culmination of Margaret Atwood’s brilliant satirical trilogy, Maddaddam begins just after most of the human population has been eradicated by the man-made plague unleashed on the world by Crake. The various survivors of the pandemic gather together on a new frontier, forging alliances between humans and their bioengineered creations, resisting the attacks of the crazed Painballers, carefully and ingeniously husbanding their meagre resources, all the while creating a new story about the end of failed humanity and the origins of a new and more evolved version.

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